Brody's Scribbles... Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto. Have We Made Progress Since 1971? (Part 18)

By Tim Trent (Dartmouth, England) MAR 23 | As we reach part 18 of this deconstruction and critique of the 1971 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto I'm starting to breath a sigh of relief. We have reached the aims of the organisation. That's a long way in! Those aims are pretty chunky:

AIMS

The long-term goal of Gay Liberation, which inevitably brings us into conflict with the institutionalised sexism of this society, is to rid society of the gender-role system which is at the root of our oppression. This can only be achieved by eliminating the social pressures on men and women to conform to narrowly defined gender roles. It is particularly important that children and young people be encouraged to develop their own talents and interests and to express their own individuality rather than act out stereotyped parts alien to their nature.

As we cannot carry out this revolutionary change alone, and as the abolition of gender rotes is also a necessary condition of women's liberation, we will work to form a strategic alliance with the women's liberation movement, aiming to develop our ideas and our practice in close inter-relation. In order to build this alliance, the brothers in gay liberation will have to be prepared to sacrifice that degree of male chauvinism and male privilege that they still all possess.

To achieve our long term goal will take many years, perhaps decades. But attitudes to the appropriate place of men and women in our society are changing rapidly, particularly the belief in the subordinate place for women. Modern conditions are placing increasing strain on the small nuclear family containing one adult male and one adult female with narrowly defined roles and bound together for life.

To me the first paragraph is designed to bring LGBT folk of the day into direct conflict with the environment that they also needed to live within. It s not unreasonable to look for direct equality between men and women, boys and girls, heterosexual and homosexual, but the terms it's couched in are not ones to engineer a change. Instead they are to eliminate something that has been educated in to society, certainly in the monotheistic western world, for many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

Tradition and history and culture are not easily eliminated. History demonstrates that attempts to do so have often failed, except where the target group was small. Despite strenuous attempts over the years, the English failed to eliminate Welsh as a language. Today it is protected in Welsh schools. Previously children were beaten for speaking it. But Christian missionaries did eliminate the culture on Easter Island, such that we no longer have any idea how those astounding carved heads were put there, nor do we know what they were for. The oppression of the Australian Aborigines failed, as did the oppression of the native peoples of the North American land mass. But it was a close thing.

So elimination, a things that struggles with minorities, can never be used as an objective on a majority with any hope of even a minor success.

How wise, then to align the GLF with women's equality groups, people who had already gained great experience of educating, lobbying, protesting and succeeding. Nonetheless I have never seen equality of the sexes as abolishing the roles each sex adopts. There are genuine biological differences of form and function that make women, while certainly intellectually equal to men, less able to perform some physical tasks and better able to perform others. And different women are better or less good at different things. So are different men.

Equality of the sexes refers, or should refer, to equality of opportunity. Men who wish to perform what were seen by society as women's tasks should have the free opportunity to do so and for equal pay with the women. Women should have the same right with men's traditional tasks. Thus logic works with emotion. And society is more relaxed because of the acceptance of people in what are, initially, unexpected roles.

This is true, too, of the homosexual, bisexual, lesbian and trans folk... No, it is not.

Heresy?

Not at all. It's do do with who LGBT folk are. And that itself is fluid. So let me try to define that as best I can, and them move on to whether we have made progress. Many people reading this article are heterosexual, or they have given their orientation no thought and have a heterosexual orientation like most of humankind, by default. They, you, are part of the majority.

You, as a heterosexual human being, are not defined by your sexual orientation. You may be a mother or a father, a welder, a playwright, an accountant; you may be atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu; you may be left or right handed, or ambidextrous; you may be black, white, brown, yellow, pink; you may be a genius, run of the mill, less than averagely intelligent; you may be sporty or not at all sporty. You may be so many things, but none of these define who you are.

Assuming you are a fan of football, when you go to a game you are a football fan. It defines you because of the situation in which you find yourself.

When you attend a wedding, you are not heterosexual, you are a wedding guest. You are all of the many and diverse facets that help to define you, but none of them exclusively.

I am the same. My sexuality is homosexual. When I watch a game of rugby football, I am a rugby fan, not a homosexual, and not a homosexual rugby fan. When I work I am the expert in what I do for a living, not a homosexual worker. When I attend a gay pride parade I an as gay as that parade, because of the event itself and how it makes me feel.

Demographically the same percentage of welders, librarians, police officers, criminals, school teachers, manual labourers, fashion models is homosexual. It's the same with nations, with races. And that brings me to the point. I know you were wondering.

In order to win the equality of everything that LGBT people desire, deserve, some sort of artificial 'community' has had to be created. Welders have trade unions. Puerto Ricans just are Puerto Rican. Black people, while having huge variety of races and skin colours, have a common enough skin colour. LGBT people are just LGBT. We had no community, no natural rallying point. And so we created one.

I've ripped parts of this manifesto to shreds so far. Some of it is risible. But in 1971 it was far, far better than anything else.

And we've made substantial progress. And I'll try to wrap that up in the last couple of parts of this critique and analysis.

I'm there, with the black guy and the rainbow flag. What I want to know is, even though the aims above are not congruent with what we want today and were at odds with society anyway, where do you stand?